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5 Stats That Explained the World This Week

By IAN BREMMER

April 27, 2014

The right statistic is often worth a thousand words—and sometimes much more than that. These five weekly data points, put together by Ian Bremmer, president and founder of the risk consultancy Eurasia Group, provide a glimpse into global trends, political dangers and international power dynamics. Some are counterintuitive facts. Others are small stats that tell a big story. This week, Ian looks at figures from China’s urban real estate market to Canadian oil ambitions—and what they mean for everybody else.

Today, a quarter of American children live in single-parent homes. This comes with a huge economic burden: Over 20 percent of children raised in single-parent families end up in long-term poverty, compared with just 2 percent of those raised in two-parent homes. Over the last 50 years, the rise in out-of-wedlock births and divorces has been dramatic. In 1960, more than 76 percent of African-Americans and 96 percent of whites were born to married couples. Today it’s 30 percent for blacks and 70 percent for whites. In 2006, the out-of-wedlock birthrate for Hispanics surpassed 50 percent. According to a 2009 Brookings Institution report, today’s poverty rate would be shaved by a quarter if family structures still resembled those of 1970.

Living Arrangements in Households With Children Under 18, 1960-2011

The size of China’s urban real estate market is staggering: There are more than 160 Chinese cities with populations over one million people. (The United States has nine.) Real estate investment makes up more than 10 percent of China’s GDP and 20 percent of outstanding loans. China’s high building-turnover rate also helps keep demand high: In 2010, an expert in the Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development estimated that buildings in China last just 25 to 30 years, compared with an average of 74 years in the United States. Analysts have been predicting the burst of the China real estate “bubble” for years. If that moment does come, it will be disastrous for the Chinese economy, and the global repercussions could be significant.

Earlier this month, Gazprom sent the first shipment of oil from its controversial Arctic offshore oil platform. By some estimates, the Arctic holds 30 percent of the world’s remaining undiscovered oil and gas reserves. But don’t expect Russia to reap massive Arctic rewards any time soon. Gazprom estimates that the Prirazlomnoye field will produce an estimated 120,000 barrels per day by 2020—that equates to about 1/100th of Russian daily oil production.

As India engages in the largest democratic election in world history, it’s important to remember that for every 10 registered male voters in India, there are only 8.8 females. This can be partially explained by the country’s rising gender imbalance. The growing use of prenatal gender testing and selective abortion means that today in India there are just 9.4 females for every 10 males. And the opportunities for those females are scant: In the World Economic Forum's 2013 Global Gender Gap Index, which measures economic, political, educational and health-based gender disparities, India ranked 101 out of 136, right between Cameroon and Malaysia. Only 11 percent of elected members of India's parliament are women.

President Obama has postponed a decision on the Keystone XL pipeline yet again, but something many Americans don’t know is that there are currently six other Canadian pipeline projects in the planning stages that, combined, would carry about 3.2 million barrels per day—that’s as much volume as four Keystones. Today, 97 percent of Canada’s oil exports go to the United States, accounting for more than a quarter of U.S. imports—a greater share than any other country. But the approval of just some of these new pipelines (and the supply they would carry with them) could help Canada diversify its oil exports enough to become a global player.